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Inside Cantor's stunning loss

Dave Brat's victory speech

That contrast is a microcosm of the difference in sophistication between Cantor’s campaign, and the insurgent challenge of Dave Brat, a relatively unknown economics professor from Randolph-Macon College. And it illustrates just how shocking it is that Brat was able to topple the majority leader after 13 years representing Virginia’s conservative Seventh District in Washington.

In interviews here with Brat and Cantor allies, and Brat himself, a sketch of the insurgent’s winning strategy emerges — and it runs completely counter to the conventional wisdom of this election cycle.

This year was branded as one where the establishment strikes back. In some places, it has — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) toppled his tea party challenger by running an aggressive campaign.

But people in Cantor and Brat’s camps say that the majority leader struck back too hard.

Cantor’s aides take pride in running a strong race against any candidate — Democrat or Republican. But the $2 million Cantor spent to brand Brat as a liberal professor may have had the reverse effect, people close to him and Brat say. It showed voters there was an alternative to Cantor -and that was exactly what many voters wanted.

“The negative ads calling me a liberal professor at first they started off with kind of comic strips,” Brat said in an interview here late Tuesday night. “And everyone kind of liked them. Me and my boy watched them the first night and kind of died laughing. We thought they were funny.”

“They gave me $1 million in name ID and I think that got us going, I think. I’m not a political expert on that, but I think they kind of saw that was happening and they made those a little darker, and they were black and green and looked like a Star Wars thing by the time they got done with it – it made me look like a pretty serious guy.”

In both Richmond and Washington, the political class is stunned by Cantor’s defeat. But in an April interview with POLITICO, and again Tuesday night, Brat maintained that he thought he had Cantor cornered. He just didn’t have the polling or political operation to prove it.

On Tuesday night, when the 11-point win was in the books, Brat conceded he was shocked. His supporters flooded the atrium of an office building here in the Richmond suburbs. But Brat sat removed from the action in an office with empty soda cans strewn across a table, chatting on his cellphone. A few volunteers, aides and supporters ate freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and crackers. Brat was sifting through 100 voice mails and 300 texts and emails, he said. Brat said he had not spoken to Cantor since the majority leader conceded in a ballroom at a Westin Hotel in Richmond.

“I think it was just kind of a perfect combination of when I was walking door-to-door, you just go up to the door and talk to the average person and everybody is in agreement that the country’s on the wrong track, right?” he said, before appearing on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program.

“You just walk up to the door and say, ‘How are you doing?’ and everyone knows we’re on the wrong track. The problem with modern politics is everybody is doing sound bite stuff. In my stump speech, I give 20 minutes on why I think we’re off track. And I think people do really want to engage in a serious high-level discussion on how to get the country back on track because people care about their own country.”

Indeed, Brat did talk about policy in his stump speech. He railed on Cantor for enabling President Barack Obama, said he supported “amnesty” for undocumented immigrants and blamed him for lax insider trading rules for lawmakers and aides on Capitol Hill.